What the Nazis did to the prisoners AFTERWARDS is unbearable…

She wasn't expecting much, but she received three letters from three elderly women who claimed to have been in an unimaginable place. Mora went to meet them, and their stories confirmed everything she had imagined. The first was Simone Lefèvre, 21 years old, a resident of Lille. Arrested in 1943, at the age of 21, she had been accused of helping members of the Resistance.

She was taken to the old factory and spent eight months there. When Morau showed her the pages of the notebooks, she began to tremble. “I remember this order,” he said, pointing to a note. “Undress and kneel.” I heard it every day. Every single day. He talks about the ice-cold pools, the injections, the women brought in, and never about income.

Then he said something comforting. The worst thing wasn't the pain, but the certainty that no one would find it. Simon described how the women tried to support each other in the cells, how they whispered prayers together in the darkness, how they shared the meager rations of moldy pain they received once a day, how they held hands when one of them was brought in, knowing she might never return.

These small acts of solidarity were all that remained of their humanity in a place designed to annihilate them. They also remembered the sounds: the clatter of boots in the corridors, the creaking of metal doors, the orders shouted in German, the silence that followed, and sometimes, very rarely, a cry, a cry that suddenly died away, then nothing more.

This silence was worse than any scream, because it meant that someone had stopped fighting, that someone had surrendered, or worse still, that someone was dead. The second witness was 75-year-old Marguerite Blanc, who lived in a nursing home in Arouant. Very frail, but still lucid, she described Vulker as a man who never screamed.